Background: 15 years of experience in software and apparently spoiled because it was already set up correctly.
Been practicing doing my own servers, published a test site and 24 hours later, root was compromised.
Rolled back to the backup before I made it public and now I have a security checklist.
Almost the same here. I also change some ssh settings: disable root login, disable password, allow only public key login. That’s about it. I never had any problems.